Tim Baca 2nd Place Landscapes (Lunar Storm) While exploring this moon like landscape known as Bisti Badlands with friend…
Ada Deer, tireless advocate for Native American rights, dies at 88
Ada Deer, who advocated for Native American rights both in and out of government, lobbying for tribal self-determination in the 1970s and later shaping federal policy as the first woman to lead the Bureau of Indian Affairs, died Aug. 15 at a hospice center in Fitchburg, Wis., a suburb of Madison. She was 88.
Her godson Ben Wikler, the chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, confirmed her death but did not cite a cause.
Ms. Deer, a member of the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin, was a tireless champion for American Indians, campaigning on behalf of Indigenous people while also working as a social worker and educator. “Ada would often talk about how most people wait around for someone else to do something — and you didn’t have to wait, you could just go for it,” Wikler said in a phone interview. “She lived that out all through her life.”
Beginning in the early 1970s, Ms. Deer campaigned to reverse the policy known as termination, in which the federal government disbanded tribes as sovereign entities, ostensibly to force Native Americans to assimilate into mainstream society.
The program proved devastating to tribes such as the Menominee, which numbered some 3,300 people before the Menominee Termination Act took effect in 1961. State and federal funding dried up, schools closed, a hospital was shuttered and the tribe’s property was transferred to a state corporation. Menominee Indian Reservation became Menominee County, the smallest and soon the poorest county in the state.
“It was a cultural, economic, and political disaster that struck deep into the hearts of the Menominee — a violation of our treaties and a betrayal of the government’s responsibilities to our tribe,” Ms. Deer later said.
In 1970, while in her mid-30s, she partnered with other organizers to launch an advocacy group called Determination of Rights and Unity for Menominee Stockholders, or DRUMS, which fought to prevent the sale of tribal land. With support from the Native American Rights Fund and Wisconsin Judicare, a legal aid organization, she took the fight to Washington, helping to develop and promote legislation that would restore federal recognition of the Menominee.
“Mainly, I want to show people who say nothing can be done in this society that it just isn’t so,” she told The Washington Post in 1973. “You don’t have to collapse just because there’s federal law in your way. Change it!”
Later that year, President Richard M. Nixon signed the Menominee Restoration Act, bringing federal services back to the Menominee and restoring tribal government. Ms. Deer was widely credited with spearheading the legislation — “I don’t know anyone who could have brought that bill so far so fast,” Rep. Lloyd Meeds (D-Wash.), the chair of the Indian affairs subcommittee, said at the time — and became the first woman to lead the Menominee Nation, serving as chair from 1974 to 1976.
Ms. Deer went on to teach at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she lectured on social work and helped found the school’s American Indian studies program, which she later directed. She also ventured into politics, running twice for Wisconsin secretary of state and, in 1992, becoming the first Native American woman in the state to run for U.S. Congress.
Campaigning on a platform that called for universal health insurance and cuts to defense spending, she stunned Wisconsin political analysts with her Democratic primary victory over state lawmaker David Clarenbach. Addressing her supporters in a victory speech, she declared, “I’ve been waiting a long time to say this: Me, nominee!” The line, a riff on her tribe’s name, appeared on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal the next day.
As in her earlier races, Ms. Deer was ultimately unsuccessful, losing the general election to Rep. Scott Klug, the Republican incumbent, who got about 63 percent of the vote. But the campaign helped raise her profile, and in 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed her assistant secretary of the interior for Indian affairs. The position made her the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an agency with some 12,000 employees, a budget of more than $1.5 billion and a role shaping federal policy for more than 500 tribes across the country, including through the management of schools, police departments, social services and natural-resource rights.
The bureau had been accused for years of incompetence and mismanagement, and Ms. Deer was not entirely successful in shedding that reputation. But she drew praise for granting greater authority to tribal governments and repairing relationships with Native American leaders, and was credited with defending the agency from attacks by budget-slashing Republicans in Congress. Admirers also noted that shortly after her confirmation, the agency reclassified a number of Indigenous Alaskan villages as tribes, granting them the same rights and privileges as other Native groups.
“Ada has been the catalyst for significant changes in the way the Department approaches Indian Affairs,” Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said when Ms. Deer announced her resignation in 1997. “Her priority has been on righting historic wrongs.” Because of Ms. Deer’s efforts to shift authority to tribal governments, he added, “tribes are better equipped and more empowered than ever before.”
The oldest of five children, Ada Elizabeth Deer was born in Keshena, a town on the Menominee Reservation in northern Wisconsin, on Aug. 7, 1935. She grew up in a one-room log cabin without running water or electricity.
Her father, a Menominee, worked at a lumber mill and was an alcoholic, according to Ms. Deer, with a raging temper that she traced to his childhood. His mother had died during the 1918 flu epidemic, and he had been sent to a Catholic boarding school for Native children, where he was punished for speaking the tribe’s language and maintaining ties to its culture.
Ms. Deer’s mother came from a White Quaker family in Philadelphia and left home to work as a nurse with the BIA. She went on to embrace her husband’s Menominee culture and taught Ms. Deer to do the same, bringing her to tribal meetings when she was as young as 4.
Her mother also sought to introduce her to the wider world. Ms. Deer studied at public schools in Shawano and Milwaukee, because the reservation had no high school of its own, and won a Native American beauty contest as a teenager. The prize was a cameo appearance in a 1954 western, “The Battle of Rogue River,” although the Hollywood production didn’t go quite as she expected: Makeup artists decided she didn’t look the part of a Native American and spent two hours painting her face, according to an account in The Post.
Ms. Deer received a bachelor’s degree in social work from the University of Wisconsin in 1957, becoming the first Menominee to graduate from the school. In 1961, she became the first Native American to receive a master’s in social work from Columbia.
Over the next decade, Ms. Deer worked as a social worker in New York City and Minneapolis; served in Puerto Rico with the Peace Corps; and spent three years in Minnesota as a community service coordinator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She was studying at the University of Wisconsin Law School when she dropped out to focus on her advocacy work with the Menominee.
Ms. Deer, who is survived by two sisters, later worked on prison reform in Wisconsin. She never married and had no children, “but she was everyone’s auntie,” said her godson Wikler, with an extended family that grew to include first-time political candidates whom she would join on the campaign trail, offering support while knocking on voters’ doors.
By then, any anxieties she had from her early days running for public office had disappeared. “I speak up. I speak out,” she said in a 2018 interview with the University of Wisconsin. “It’s not like I plotted and planned. I just had this general goal. I want to do and I want to be and I want to help. And I’ve been able to do it.
“People think you’re born this way,” she continued, “but you create your way as you go along. No. Your life evolves.”
Jeffrey Gibson’s ‘sexy’ new book showcases the complexity of Indigenous art
What started as a dream to build an Indigenous community that challenges ideas of contemporary art and colonial categorization has resulted in a catalogue featuring more than 60 Indigenous artists. The book explores what it means to combine different identities and methods of making art across the globe.
Nearly 20 years ago, Jeffrey Gibson, of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee descent, began dreaming of an anthology that showcased contemporary Indigenous creatives across various mediums while moving beyond the page, offering a counterexample to earlier publications he had seen.
According to Gibson, within the art world’s institutions, there is a history of pervasive racism, which has led to an industry that often tries to confine artists into one specific box or label their work according to identity, traditions, or their traumas.
He noted that the industry is often attached to diversity initiatives, causing many Indigenous artists to question whether their participation hinged on who they were instead of what they made.
“The culture that I’ve grown up with surrounding Indigenous people felt like the boundaries were drawn so tightly as to what we’re allowed to do, who we’re supposed to be, and what we’re supposed to look like. I’ve never fit that model myself, and I have always been drawn to other Native people who also don’t fit that model,” says Gibson.
“So much of the 20th-century writing around Native artists is almost about justifying their work and relationship to western art history, and explaining why it’s Native, and often trying to draw a direct line to precedents and beadwork, or precedents and materials or in painting.”
He added that this approach is often restrictived an limits the freedom of artists to express themselves and showcase what their Indigeneity means to them instead.
“I wanted to make a book that did that,” he said.
Gibson and his team spent two and a half years reaching out to an ever-evolving group of Indigenous creatives to be a part of this project.
They then worked to present their art in a large-format book with beautiful images that includes thoughts from curators, poets and writers – all while infusing the cultural and distinctly different identities of communities.
And now, Gibson’s dream is coming to life with the release of An Indigenous Present, published by DelMonico Books and Big NDN Press, on Aug. 22, 2023.
This collection gathers more than 60 Indigenous contemporary artists, including many Indigenous artists from “Canada,” such as Dana Claxton, Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Rebecca Belmore, Beau Dick, Wally Dion, Korina Emmerich, Brian Jungen, Meryl McMaster, Caroline Monnet, Audie Murray, Arielle Twist, and Zoon a.k.a. Daniel Glen Monkman.
“An Indigenous Present has emerged as much out of my dissatisfaction with the circumstances I have navigated during my own career as it has from witnessing artists who proudly identify as Indigenous carve out their own creative spaces and, collectively, manifest both local and international contexts for their artworks,” Gibson writes in the introduction.
He spoke to IndigiNews by phone from his office, a turn-of-the-century schoolhouse in the Hamlet of Claverack, just outside of Hudson, New York, where the original classrooms have been converted into sewing rooms, painting rooms, woodshops, a kitchen, and more.
There, Gibson created a shared studio space with other artists in the surrounding area. This type of environment is exactly the sort of energy Gibson was looking for with An Indigenous Present, as sharing and reciprocity have always been an ethos within Indigenous culture.
“I wanted this collection to be about people whose work I’m excited by that I’ve casually come across over the last 25 years, but it’s not really that casual because Native art is always a destination. It’s the world I’ve paid attention to and the people I have been inspired by,” says Gibson.
“I wished for a different kind of art system, one that looked at and related to artworks from the cultural perspective of their Indigenous makers. I knew I wasn’t alone in wanting these things,” he says in the intro of the book.
Look at any curated collection of Indigenous artists from the past, and what you’ll mostly see is the influence of traditional design or academic essays illustrated with artwork by Indigenous makers.
What the creators in An Indigenous Present are making moves past those distilled perspectives, allowing for the pieces to be in conversation with one another rather than an addition to the curator’s thoughts.
And it is this that Gibson hopes to interrogate, stating that “other Indigenous artists were contributing to – and authoring – new conversations that challenged the outdated perceptions of who we are and what we make” already.
He said that the underlying message is that being Indigenous is instilled within the creator, and within these intersections of different identities, this collection aims to “create a visual experience that foregrounds diverse approaches to concept, form and medium as well as connection, influence, conversation and collaboration.”
“We are spread far and wide, and we are all very different. So you’re going to talk to one person who is Inuit, and they’re going to talk to you about materials and intention in one way. And then you’re going to talk to a Pueblo person, and they’re going to share something completely different,” he shares.
With a history of displacement, banning cultural practices, and a global industry of fake Indigenous art, these artists are working hard to reimagine a new space that binds the past, present, and future. And since the lifting of the potlatch ban in 1951, Indigenous creators have, in fact, been revitalizing and redefining their presence in the art world while expressing creative and cultural sovereignty.
Working alongside many curators over the years, Gibson spent a lot of time thinking about how Indigenous artists have been presented historically. They often showcased it based on the region or generation of the artist, or whether it was traditional or contemporary, but with this collection, he wanted to consider the contents of the artwork he was looking at.
“I really want this book to help contextualize, even if there’s an artist who isn’t in the book, this book could serve to give context to their work,” he explains.
Gibson and his team made over 60 virtual studio visits with Indigenous artists before sitting down to organize the content in a way that didn’t have to section artists into areas such as “textiles,” “painting,” or “weaving.”
Working with managing editor Jenelle Porter and the graphic design studio OTAMI-is based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), they had many conversations about art, concepts, materials, community, the art scene, and more.
“I wanted to make a lavish picture book (“sexy” was a word I used a lot to describe this project) that invites an audience to consider the creative and conceptual spaces artists need to think freely, disrupt the flow, take chances, make mistakes, and even fail in the process of creating something new,” Gibson shares in the introduction of the book.
It was also crucial for Gibson to incorporate Indigenous humour into this collection because it is rooted within the culture and has always been a form of survival.
“This book includes many artworks that make me laugh with their cleverness and sarcasm, made by artists like Rebecca Belmore, Lewis deSoto, James Luna, New Red Order, Wendy Red Star, and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, among others,” Gibson writes in the intro.
“These artworks operate in the realm of a knowing wink from someone who understands what it is like to be Indigenous in the 20th and 21st centuries.”
One important intention from the beginning was the creation of an equitable distribution plan, which asked each artist to share up to four addresses of places where they want to send the book free of charge, creating low-barrier access to the book within their communities and in places like independent, Indigenous run spaces and public libraries. He shares that the book has already gone into its second printing before its release.
“An Indigenous Present is not meant to be the definitive account on the subject of Native and Indigenous art and artists. Not at all,” he wrote.
“There is so much work to be done, so many histories to recount and collect. And most importantly, there are so many emerging artists to nurture and support.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sculpture unveiled in Albany
Today Gov. Kathy Hochul unveils a sculpture of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Harry Jackson Institute Gifts Sculptures to Cody and Italian Sister City | Big Horn Basin Media
The Harry Jackson Institute has announced that the Institute will gift sculptures by the late artist Harry Jackson to the Sister Cities of Camaiore, Italy and
Crystal Bridges offering free teen photography mentorship program
Teens are encouraged to register for the program, regardless of experience level. No special equipment is required. The program is designed to help teens amplify their portrait photography skills, including everything from practical photo-taking techniques to how to exhibit their work.
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Cody Art Show Has National Appeal As Auction Expected To Fetch More Than $1.2 Million
The annual Buffalo Bill Art Show and Sale kicks off one of the most prestigious Western art events in the nation. This year its auction is expected to fetch more than $1.2 million.
Tell Me More: Colossal Releases a Limited-Edition Print with Liz Flores
We’re beyond excited to announce our latest limited-edition print collaboration with Chicago-based artist Liz Flores (previously). “Tell Me More” features one of Flores’ signature color-blocked figures in warm shades of pink and neutral tones. Lounging on a patterned rug with delicate tassels lining the perimeter, the woman lets her long braids drape over her body as she entreats the viewer for more.
The giclée print is signed and numbered and available in an edition of 100 from the Colossal Shop.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article Tell Me More: Colossal Releases a Limited-Edition Print with Liz Flores appeared first on Colossal.
Book marketing group available through Watermark Art Center
BEMIDJI — Watermark Art Center is offering a book marketing support group where authors can learn how to market their books on the third Thursday of every month starting in September.
The monthly membership club will offer authors the opportunity to focus on necessary marketing tasks, have accountability to get their marketing done and receive tutelage from an expert book marketing coach.
The group is for serious authors of all publishing paths, a release said. Authors will learn from Emily Enger, founder of Good Enough Book Marketing, and spend time working on the marketing strategies they choose.
The club will hold meetings from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on the third Thursday of every month starting in September and running through April 2024, at Watermark’s education studio. Preferred participants are authors of creative genres such as fiction, creative narrative nonfiction or poetry.
Due to limited space, participants must submit an application prior to registration, the release said. If accepted, applicants will receive further instructions to complete the course registration.
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The application process is free. If accepted, the cost for the course is $500. Apply online at
What Camera Lens Should I Buy? A Guide for Beginner Photographers
Many photographers will say that your camera lens is as important (or even more important) than your camera body. All of the light that your camera body captures has to go through some sort of lens, which affects sharpness, distortion, amount of light, perspective, and many other variables.
Although your camera body is important and you may benefit from different features with different styles of photography, having the right lens is often key to making many great shots – regardless of what body you have. This guide will provide you with the information you will need to decide what camera lens(es) you should buy. Fair warning: lens acquisition can be addicting!
Table of Contents
What Is a Lens?
First things first: what even are lenses, and why do photographers obsess over them? Lenses direct the light from the scene you want to capture toward the camera’s sensor. In film cameras, lenses direct light onto the film. Lenses are typically characterized by their focal length, in millimeters, and their aperture, in f-stops.
Today, many entry-level cameras are what we call “point-and-shoot” cameras. They usually have built-in, non-interchangeable lenses that can zoom. Although these have greatly improved in quality in the past decade, there are still limits to having a built-in lens that can’t be changed. On the other hand, DSLRs and mirrorless cameras dominate the professional market right now and usually allow photographers to change lenses depending on their situation. To find out if your camera’s lens can be changed, read its manual or search the internet.
Lens Characterization: Focal Length
In basic terms, the focal length of a lens is how “zoomed in” or “zoomed out” your lens can be. This is very important when deciding what lens to get. The actual measurement is in millimeters, and it is the distance between your lens’s optical center and your camera’s image sensor when the lens is focused.
The higher the number, the more zoomed in your image will be. The lower the number, the more zoomed out your image will be. On a zoom lens, you’ll see focal length written as “##-##mm,” where the lower number is the most zoomed out and the higher number is the most zoomed-in focal length that a lens can achieve.
For reference, if your eyes had a focal length, it would be somewhere around 20mm, which is fairly wide. On the other end of the spectrum, many sports and wildlife photographers that you’ll see with large lenses are using focal lengths somewhere around 300-800mm.
You can easily find lenses that go as wide as 18mm and zoom in to 300mm, but mechanical limitations mean that it’s less common to have a lens that “does it all” with great quality. Yes, 18-300mm lenses exist (and many combinations in-between), but they might be heavier, lower quality, more expensive, or perform worse in low light than other focal lengths.
In the lens world, you’ll often hear people refer to “kit lenses.” These are usually less-expensive lenses that come with a camera body when you buy a kit. The most common kit lens is an 18-55mm lens, which goes from fairly wide to slightly zoomed in.
While many lenses zoom, some lenses don’t. These are called prime lenses, and they have a single, fixed focal length.
Read more: Prime vs Zoom Lenses: A Beginner’s Guide
Prime lenses often have wider maximum apertures than zoom lenses, which will be discussed later in this article. They’re also sometimes lighter, more compact, and sharper because their components don’t need to move. They tend to have fewer mechanical errors because there are fewer moving parts. Their biggest downsides are that they don’t zoom in or out at all, so you might need to carry more than one lens to a shoot if you’re using any prime lenses.
The most common prime lens is a 50mm lens that many photographers call the “nifty-fifty.”
A note about sensor crop: Sensor size affects a lens’s field of view, which can be confusing. A full-frame sensor camera, which is usually more expensive, will produce images without any crop (hence full-frame). A crop sensor camera, also called an APS-C sensor (common in entry-level DSLR and mirrorless cameras), produces images with ~1.5x relative crop.
In other words, an image shot at 50mm on an APS-C sensor would have the same field of view as an image shot at 75mm on a full-frame sensor camera. Many sports and wildlife photographers opt for APS-C sensors because of the increased relative zoom. Many landscape photographers opt for full-frame sensors because they give wider relative images.
To figure out your camera’s sensor size, check your camera’s manual or search the internet. To learn more about different sensor sizes, check out this article.
Lens Characterization: Aperture
Aperture is an opening inside a lens that light travels through, and it’s another very important consideration when choosing a new lens. It can be wider and let more light through, or smaller and let less light through. Additionally, wider apertures create more of a blurry background (more depth of field). Some lens apertures can go wider than others, letting more light through and thus being easier to shoot with in dark environments. Some apertures are fixed, and can’t open and close. Either way, lenses are often more expensive if they have wider apertures – mostly because that requires more glass. If you want to learn more about what aperture actually does and how to use it, check out this guide.
Lenses will most often be named with their focal length followed by their maximum aperture. Aperture is written in f-stops, and will look like “f/#.#.” Due to mechanics, some zoom lenses have variable maximum apertures. They’ll be written something like “f/#.#-#.#.” This denotes the maximum aperture that the lens can achieve at each end of its zoom range (zoomed out to zoomed in). For example, the most common kit lens mentioned above is an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens.
To give you an idea of how much aperture affects lens cost, a used Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L lens is somewhere around $600-800 in the current market, with obvious variations in age and quality. A used Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0 L lens is somewhere around $300-400. The extra stop of light is worth double the price to many people. There are other considerations about lens sharpness and other features, but the aperture is the most important in this case.
Other Lens Parameters
Aside from focal length and aperture, there are other features that you may come across when deciding what lens to buy.
- Autofocus and manual focus. This is often abbreviated using an “AF/MF” button on most lenses. This isn’t just a matter of old versus new lenses, as some manufacturers produce new lenses that are manually focused for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is to cut lens costs, and manual focus lenses can often be much more economical.
- Image stabilization. Different manufacturers use different abbreviations for this, but you may see it referred to as IS (Image Stabilization), VR (Vibration Reduction), or something more simple such as Stabilization. This technology essentially uses electronics to stabilize a lens, reducing the amount of handheld camera shake that is present in an image. Lenses with stabilization are harder to make, and therefore they are usually more expensive. When paired with a camera body that has in-body stabilization, shake can be reduced dramatically.
- Minimum focusing distance. Every lens has a minimum distance at which it must be from a subject in order for the subject to still be in focus. Macro lenses, for example, have very low minimum focusing distances so that photographers can get inches (or even closer) from their subjects and still focus properly. Some older, larger lenses have minimum focusing distances of many feet.
- Lens diameter. This is often confused with focal length because it is also measured in millimeters. This is usually found on the end of a lens barrel and denotes the inner diameter of the front of the lens. This is useful for finding filters that will fit correctly, amongst other things.
- Lens weight. Although it may not seem fully necessary for everybody to consider, lenses can get quite heavy because they’re often made of a lot of glass. Shooting with a lens that’s too heavy for hours on end can be exhausting, so many photographers like to compare lens weights when looking at different lenses. Although a tripod can help alleviate exhaustion, tripods can’t always handle really heavy camera and lens weights. Tripods also can be cumbersome to set up and move around.
- Special uses. Some lenses are designed to create special effects or be used for certain things. Tilt-shift lenses, for example, have special components that allow the photographer to straighten lines (often used in architectural photography). Fisheye lenses are usually very wide lenses that create interesting, properly-named effects. Macro lenses can allow for incredible magnification of subjects that are fractions of an inch away from the end of the lens.
So, Which Lens Should I Buy?
After learning about different lens terms and parameters, you need to find a lens that will do what you want on your budget. Many people swear by lenses that come directly from your camera manufacturer (i.e. Canon, Nikon, Sony), but they’re usually a bit more expensive.
Others believe in the power of third-party lenses (i.e. Tamron, Sigma, Rokinon, Samyang, Tokina), and some even claim that certain models are sharper or better than the same lens coming from the camera manufacturer.
Another option is to buy a used lens, although it can come with risks. New lenses usually come with warranties, return periods, and the assurance that the lens is high-quality. Old lenses can have cracks, mold, faulty mechanisms, and more. However, used lenses can also be fantastic deals on gear that someone is simply not using anymore. Manufacturers usually make lens editions, and buying a first or second edition of a lens can often be much less expensive than the latest edition with similar quality. Newer lenses tend to have faster autofocus and better stabilization, but if you don’t mind waiting a bit longer for autofocus or keeping your camera more steady, older used lenses might be the way to go.
If you’re really torn between two or more lenses and you want to really make the right decision, there are many lens rental services available locally or online. Some rental services will ship you a lens with a return shipping label, and all you have to do is pay for shipping plus the days that you’re using the lens. The process is streamlined and very useful when deciding what to invest in.
If you’re looking for a lens based on a certain type of photography, here are a few pointers. Keep in mind that these are just starting places, and many people have gotten great results using unconventional lenses in different scenarios.
Landscape: You probably want a lens that can zoom pretty wide (called a wide-angle lens). Something as wide as 12mm might be a bit overkill, but popular landscape lenses are the 24-70mm lens or something a bit wider like a 16-35mm lens.
Portrait: Your biggest priority should be a wide maximum aperture so that you can create a nice blurry background. The most widely used portrait lens is a “nifty fifty,” which is a 50mm f/1.8 lens. They’re usually cost-effective, lightweight, and produce great shots. Anything with a maximum aperture around f/1.8, or even around f/2.8 would be good for portraits. Other fantastic portrait lenses include 85mm lenses, which can often flatter subjects more due to their compression at a higher focal length and greater distance from the subject. Some photographers use 70-200mm lenses to achieve a similar result.
Wildlife and Sports: Usually, you’ll want a lens that can make your subject fill the frame. This might be a telephoto (zoom) lens, like a 75-300mm or 100-400mm lens. You may also want something with a faster maximum aperture and with greater image quality, so you could look into getting a prime lens such as a 300, 400, or 500mm lens. Many professional sports photographers shoot with really fast prime lenses, which is why their lenses are so large.
Street: A lot of street photography is at times when there is little light. You’ll probably want something versatile, like a zoom lens with a fairly wide maximum aperture. A 24-105mm f/4 lens might be a good place to start. A 24-70mm f/2.8 might suit others better.
Macro: This one pretty much writes itself. You’ll probably want a macro lens, which is specifically designed to have a small minimum focusing distance. These come in lots of shapes and sizes, so consider what you’ll actually need for what you want to do.
Astrophotography: You need as much light as possible entering your camera, so go for a lens with a really wide maximum aperture. Something like f/2.8 is pretty fast, but even f/1.8, f/1.4, or f/1.2 just gets better. The faster the lens, the more detail that can be captured in the stars.
Conclusion
There are lots of factors to consider when buying a camera lens. The two most important factors are focal length and aperture, which can have great impacts on price and quality. Decide what you’re trying to achieve with your new lens, and look at lenses that will help you achieve those goals.
Remember that, although there are many traditional uses for certain lenses, people have made names for themselves by using lenses in new ways. Wide-angle sports images or telephoto landscapes often help people stand out from the crowd. Lenses will help you achieve your creative goals, but they may also force you to expand what your goals are.
Once you’ve decided what lens you’re looking to purchase, remember that there are many options for purchasing lenses. You can buy name-brand lenses from the manufacturer, third-party lenses, or take a look at used lens options.
Regardless of what you decide, buying a lens carefully is likely to help you take your photography where you want it to go with impressive results.
Image credits: Header photo licensed from Depositphotos
